“We are migrants. That’s our philosophy in general, the line between representation and presence”: Telfar opens Paris Fashion Week SS20

By Liam Freeman23 September 2019

The rule-breaking, New York-based designer Telfar Clemens and the brand’s artistic director and partner Babak Radboy talk to Vogue about crossing the Atlantic to create clothes that defy expectations

On Friday 6 September, during New York Fashion Week, Telfar Clemens screened a trailer of a film he has been working on, The World Isn’t Everything, providing audiences with a glimpse of his SS20 collection. In collaboration with and starring a growing circle of creatives – from playwright Jeremy O. Harris and artists Juliana Huxtable and Petra Collins, to musicians Butch Dawson and Steve Lacy – the extended version served as the backdrop (along with live DJ sets and sound art) for the Telfar show, which opened Paris Fashion Week.

“It’s not like we are leaving New York, the film is helping us be in a lot of different places,” the 34-year-old designer tells Vogue when we meet him and Telfar artistic director and partner, Babak Radboy, ahead of the show. “We don't really identify with any one place; we're not even at home in America.”

Having a presence in two cities in one season, and once again defying the traditional runway format, is just another way Telfar is instigating change in the industry. As the designer points out, in establishing a black-owned, non-gendered fashion project in New York in 2005, he achieved what was widely considered impossible.

Here, Clemens and Radboy trace the steps that brought Telfar across the Atlantic to the French capital for SS20.

What made you decide to show in Paris rather than New York this season?

Telfar Clemens (TC): I’ve been wanting to do a show here since around 2008; Paris is the world’s fashion capital. And when it comes to sales, you can meet with the buyers the day after the show rather than wait weeks until they come to New York.

As we found out, no one has ever shown on the schedule in two [of the Big Four] cities in one season before, because the FHCM [Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode] doesn’t allow it; we want to change that one day. For now, we’re treating the New York film screening as a kind of on schedule preview, while in Paris we’re showing off-schedule, but with the blessing of the FHCM. It’s like we are taking the Telfar show on tour.

How does this idea of touring, or migrating from one country to another, play out in the SS20 collection?

Babak Radboy (BR): We started producing in Italy for the first time this season, so we’re travelling back and forth from New York all the time. When you’re standing in line for customs you see almost every kind of person and every type of clothing. We made a list of the items we saw time and time again, and then set about abstracting them. There’s a whole T-shirt dress category, for example; pants that are half denim jeans, half track pants; a top that looks like a Metallica T-shirt, but it’s cut like a sleeveless 1920s wrap top; denim jeans that graduate into fishnet stockings; and slacks with a Budweiser printed cotton insert [the second consecutive season Telfar has collaborated with the American lager brand] that look like sagging pants with a pair of boxers.

Producing in Italy and showing in Paris brought up different ideas and migration is part of that. But we don’t want to talk about advocacy for migrants, we want to explode the concept – we are migrants. That’s the Telfar philosophy in general, the line between representation and presence.

The Telfar emblem – embossed onto leather bags and cut into gold earrings like the ones you’re wearing – has become pretty ubiquitous, what do you want it to stand for?

TC: For Telfar. Not Sergio Tacchini or Michael Kors, it’s a T and a C! The idea behind Telfar is to take clothes that you can’t live without and make them our own. I wanted a pair of classic Seventies-style running shorts all summer, but didn’t want to have to carry a bag, so I made a pair with pockets built into the track stripes for a wallet, keys and phone. There are slacks made the same way. It’s about deconstructing existing garments, adding or subtracting, and then putting them back together. We’ve taken the thigh-hole jean – a signature cut for us – and adapted it for jogging pants. Our classic six-pocket pants (two front pockets; two back pockets and two pouches on the front belt loops) is in a denim-khaki combo for SS20. We also have a new shoe design done in collaboration with Converse; I call them “mandles” – the bridge is open but all those other parts of the foot you want to keep covered are covered.

What inspired you to make a film for SS20?

BR: Telfar shows are like a collective, they’re never transactional – we don’t pay artists to be a part of it or to wear our clothes. Jeremy O. Harris wrote most of the dialogue and he fed Ashton Sanders the lines through an earpiece; when you see Sanders speaking in the film he’s hearing and then speaking those words for the first time. At the show, we wanted this level of surprise and risk to play out in real time rather than it be a pre-planned brand statement. We don’t even know what will happen – it’s more exciting for the audience and it’s more exciting for us. We asked the DJ Crystallmess to live score the film and the British sound artist Klein to do vocals. Before we even knew what Petra Collins was going to wear in the show, it just so happens that she appears in the running order at the same time the part of the film she directed comes on the screen.

How will the film continue to evolve?

TC: The whole film is an ongoing development. As Babak says, we don't want to control everything that happens. Now we’re hanging out in Europe and we’re documenting what happens as we go. We’d pretty much finished the collection in June in time for the menswear shows, then we did an open call to anyone who wanted to wear our clothes in a music video or TV interview and asked them to give us footage – that’s how the likes of Petra and Steve Lacy got involved. This kind of layering – like how Instagram works – is present in our clothes too, especially the T-shirt prints featuring last season’s campaign imagery and models who regularly walk in our shows, like Johan Galaxy. I don’t think you need to know that much about how it all came together; that’s the kind of work I want to create. Even if we’re not from the same background you can appreciate it and relate to it.